snark: a (well-deserved) attitude of mocking irreverence and sarcasm

January 17, 2018

I wish the organizers of the Salem Womxn's March that will be held on January 21 would stop criticizing the 2017 Salem Women's March for supposedly not being inclusive enough.

This is flat-out wrong.

The speakers at the 2017 event included an African-American woman, her daughter (who sang), and a lesbian woman. Sign language interpreters were on stage for the hearing-impaired. Special seating up front was reserved for those in wheelchairs, or anyone needing those seats.

I filmed the entire march of 4,200 people who filled the streets of downtown Salem. The video is part of this web page I made to memorialize the event:

So I know that a marvelously diverse cross-section of our city attended the event. Everybody was invited. No one was excluded. And since my wife, Laurel, was a lead organizer of the 2017 Women's March, I know that she wasn't aware of any complaints about how inclusive the march was.

Yet in a case of women criticizing women, this is part of the description of the 2018 Womxn's March on the event's Facebook page:

There was controversy from last year's march in that there was a lack of inclusivity. Many people, from Salem’s own underrepresented communities expressed their disappointment that the 2017 Salem Women’s March did not feel inclusive and that care was not given to their issues. This was discussed in several forums before and after the actual day.

Well, I don't understand how someone can feel excluded from an event before it has happened.

What I do know, because my wife just reminded me of this after I told her what I was writing about tonight, is that the organizers of the 2017 Women's March had never put on an event of this magnitude, and they worked extremely hard to make the march a big success -- which, for sure, it was.

If anyone had contacted them before the day of the march with concerns about how the march was being planned, they would have done their best to address those concerns. So for the 2018 March organizers to criticize these women (and some men) for a "controversy" they weren't made aware of strikes me as decidedly unfair.

It would have been better if the organizers of the 2018 Womxn's March had simply said something like, "This year's march is going to be better than ever!"

That would have been positive, and honored the success of the 2017 march. Instead, they're making a big deal out of the 2017 Women's March supposedly not being inclusive, even though they don't directly say how it wasn't inclusive. The only clue I could find to this is in a description of next Sunday's march in the issue of Salem Weekly that just hit the streets.

Featuring diverse speakers and encouraging blind and disabled activists to participate... "Wheelchairs, scooters, and ponchos will be provided for the disabled," says Kendall, and "signs and materials available in many languages."

OK, that's great. People who need wheelchairs don't have to bring their own. And even though one would think that disabled people who live in Oregon have their own rain gear, it doesn't hurt to have ponchos on hand.

These just strike me as relatively small improvements to the 2017 Women's March.

I see no reason to call the 2017 March uninclusive just because the hard working organizers of that event weren't able to think of some of the things that, in hindsight, could have made the event even better.

December 20, 2017

I write for lots of reasons. One is to relieve anxiety. Putting my worries into words somehow makes me feel better.

And at the moment, I'm not feeling good about the 2018 Salem Womxn's March, which I've argued should be called a Women's March to build on the amazingly successful 2017 event with that name.

Now, because there is very little public information available about next month's march other than this event notification on the Salem Resists Facebook page, maybe the concerns I'm going to relate below are misfounded. If so, I look forward to Womxn's March organizers setting me straight.

(Um, one thing that needs to be straightened out is the time. I can't believe the march is going to be 26 hours long, running from noon on Sunday to 2 pm on Monday, so I'm assuming the actual time is noon to 2 pm on Sunday, January 21.)

Names matter. So my #1 plea to the event organizers is to rethink the wisdom of calling it a Womxn's March rather than a Women's March. I talked about some reasons for this in my previous post and I'm going to elaborate on them here.

The 2017 Salem Women's March Facebook page seems to have disappeared, but an artifact remains here. This is the description on that page.

Come join Salem's offical sister event to the national Women's March on Washington, D.C. Stand in solidarity with others committed to mobilizing against fear and the upcoming marginalization and oppression of others, including the erosion of our civil rights. Will you be there to help us make history?

Absolutely, said about 4,200 people in Salem last January.

The reasons for having a Women's March are even stronger now. We aren't guessing about how horrible a president Trump would be, now we know how dangerous he is to democracy, human rights, equity, social justice.

If 4,200 people came out to protest Trump and support women last January, on a cold, rainy, windy day, organizers of the 2018 event should plan for even more people. Think 5,000, or 7,500, or even 10,000.

The Virginia and Alabama elections showed how motivated people are to come to the polls and vote against Trumpism. I've little doubt that a 2018 Salem Women's March would build on that enthusiasm. But a Womxn's March, I'm not so sure.

Just don't limit yourself by thinking a main purpose of the march is to raise people's consciousness about intersectionality (whatever that is) associated with transgender and other womxn's issues.

Because it shouldn't be.

The unspeakable horrors of what Trump and his like-minded followers are inflicting on our country need to be spoken about. Sure, these include trampling on transgender rights, but this is just a small part of what a 2018 Women's March should focus on.

Believe me, every moment organizers of the march spend explaining why they're spelling "Women" as "Womxn" is a moment that should have been used to urge people to come out and unite against the Trumpian forces that are pulling our country in a direction it absolutely must not go toward.

Remember, event organizers, this is Salem not San Francisco.

Seattle is having a 2018 Womxn Act on Seattle as a follow-up to their 2017 Women's March. Meaning, even Seattle isn't having a Womxn's march, they're having "a citywide day of learning, supporting, sharing, and acting on behalf of nonprofit organizations, grassroots and social justice groups in Seattle."

Salem leans liberal, but not by a gigantic amount.

In the 2016 presidential election Trump got 38% of the vote and Clinton 49%. March organizers should want to attract a good number of people in Salem who voted for Trump because they thought he would shake things up, and now are disheartened by how that shaking has turned out.

Yes, I realize this may seem like heresy to ardent progressives. But it is a reasonable goal.

The 2017 Women's March was wonderfully inclusive. Men and women of all ages and ethnicities cheered, marched, and danced together. In 2018 it seems possible to include an even wider range of Salemians, since Trump's popularity has been steadily sinking.

Understand: I'm not saying that organizers of next month's event need to do everything the same way as it was done in January 2017. However, they should build on the success of the 2017 Women's March, learning from the lessons of the inaugural event.

One lesson is to have a sound system that will reach more people than organizers expect to attend the event. Last January many of the 4,200 attendees couldn't hear the people who spoke prior to the march.

Another lesson is to establish a good relationship ahead of time with the Salem Police Department.

In 2017 one of the men who helped organize the Women's March (yes, men were welcomed as organizers) did a great job working with the police. This paid off when thousands more people than expected showed up, since the Women's March didn't have a permit to walk in the streets.

It would have been almost impossible to fit everybody onto sidewalks, which was the original plan. Thankfully, Salem police adjusted on the spot and allowed marchers to fill up streets on the march's route, which was much appreciated.

I'm looking forward to the 2018 Salem Womxn's March, which I hope becomes a Women's March. I also hope that organizers will take what I've written in the helpful spirit that I've intended.

December 11, 2017

Let's get some self-revealing stuff out in the open before I proceed to challenge the wisdom of calling a follow-up to last year's highly successful Salem Women's March a Womxn's March.

I'm a heterosexual (cisgender, just to show that I'm clued-in to some new-speak) man. I'm old, 69. I believe in using English words that can be pronounced. I'm married to a woman, Laurel, who was one of the lead organizers for the 2017 Salem Women's March. I created a web page that showcased this event, which attracted 4,200 enthusiastic people -- see below.

So depending on your point of view, I'm either (1) a old fogey who doesn't understand how important it is to get "men" out of "women" by making it "womxn" in order to make this word more inclusive, especially of transgender womxn, or (2) I'm someone who is knowledgeable about what made the 2017 Women's March a big success and is concerned that going down the Womxn Road is a bad idea.

As you probably can guess, personally I'm going with (2).

Yesterday I learned about the upcoming Womxn's March by coming across a Salem Resists Facebook post, a group I heartily support. A woman had questioned whether it was wise to use Womxn when other upcoming marches around the country use Women. She shared the images below.

(Note: Salem Resists isn't sponsoring the Womxn's March. The group just shared a notice of the event on their Facebook page.)

Some Googling revealed that it looks like many Women's Marches are going to be held on Saturday, January 20, while some Womxn's Marches are going to occur on Sunday, January 21 -- which is when the Salem event will be. For example, Seattle is having a Womxn Act On Seattle event on January 21.

But Seattle had a 2017 Womxn's March, so the 2018 event with a similar name is building on the 2017 success.

By contrast, here in Salem many of the 4,200 people who attended the 2017 Women's March are going to be confused by the Womxn's March. Aside from not being able to pronounce the name, they likely will wonder if it will bear any resemblance to the previous Women's March.

I also am concerned about the January 21 Womxn's March being held on a Sunday from 11 am to 1 pm. I'm not religious, but many people in Salem are. I don't know when the typical church service is these days, but I'm assuming that many are in the morning, which could cause fewer people to come to the Womxn's March.

My biggest concern, though, is how featuring "Womxn" in the name of the event is going to affect how Salemians view the march. Obviously the focus of the 2018 march should be on the horrors being wrought by the Trump administration, women's rights, and the "Me Too" wave of sexual harassment awareness.

Anything that detracts from this focus is a distraction. And often progressive groups get involved in unproductive disputes over who is more politically correct to the Nth degree which dissipate energy that should be directed at the real enemy: Donald Trump and his Republican cronies.

It appears that the organizers of the 2018 Salem Womxn's March have settled on that name. Well, I'm hoping that they will change their minds.

It'd be better if the event echoed the successful 2017 Women's March by having the same name. Then include mention of "Womxn" in the promotional materials, explaining that this word is viewed as more inclusive by some people. Also, change the date of the event to Saturday, January 20.

That way all the publicity around the Women's Marches in Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other cities can help generate interest in a Salem march on the same day.

Look, I've spent a lot of time and energy on trying to Strange Up Salem. I'm not only fine with weirdness, I'm a huge fan of it. But there's a time and a place for strange. Womxn is a weird word that shouldn't be used for a 2018 Women's March that, like the first march, should attract a broad spectrum of people in our town.

Women. Men. Liberals. Conservatives. Religious believers. Ardent atheists. People of all ages, races, ethnicities, sexual persuasions. Words can bring people together, and they also can push people apart.

My view is that Womxn is a divisive word in the context of a Women's March. I could be wrong, of course. I just feel that the risk is too high that "Womxn" will become a focus of the march rather than the pressing issues and problems that need attention in these Trumpian times.